Machine translation performed by a internet service provider as a web service is known. Even with the use of a simple rule-based translation engine, translation processes require a very large number of computations being performed by the internet service provider's server. Availability of the internet service provider's server for other users and other services is severely limited while a translation is being performed.
Modern data-driven machine translation technology (particularly statistical machine translation technology) can provide much higher quality translation than legacy rule-based systems, but is far too computationally intensive to be performed on the internet service provider's server according to current web-service models.
One rule-of-thumb for web services is that any computation process that requires more than 50 milliseconds of server CPU (central processor unit) time is too expensive to be used to respond to a web-service request. Using current methods on current processors, translating a single page of text takes on the order of 5,000 milliseconds of CPU time.
Methods and apparatus are needed to provide rapid machine translation over a network without excessive use of CPU time by a service provider's server.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.